Category Archives: 2025

Framley Parsonage by Anthony Trollope

Framley Parsonage
by Anthony Trollope
Rating: ★★★★½
Series: Chronicles of Barsetshire #4
Publication Date: January 1, 1860
Genre: classic
Pages: 580
ReRead?: Yes
Project: classics club round 2

Mark Robarts is a clergyman with ambitions beyond his small country parish of Framley. In a naive attempt to mix in influential circles, he agrees to guarantee a bill for a large sum of money for the disreputable local Member of Parliament, while being helped in his career in the Church by the same hand. But the unscrupulous politician reneges on his financial obligations, and Mark must face the consequences this debt may bring to his family.=

One of Trollope's most enduringly popular novels since it appeared in 1861, Framley Parsonage is an evocative depiction of country life in nineteenth-century England, told with great compassion and acute insight into human nature.

I completed my first read of the Chronicles of Barchester around a decade ago, in 2014-2-15. I remember thoroughly enjoying the experience, so, when a Goodreads friend mentioned she would be reading it in March, I decided to jump on board.

I, again, thoroughly enjoyed the reading experience. So much, that I’m going to reread the rest of the series, except for The Warden, which I reread last year, starting with Barchester Towers.

This book centers on a young vicar, Mark Robarts, who has the living at Framley. He is a youthful 26 years old, and is friends with Lord Lufton, whose mother, the managing Lady Lufton, has strong ideas about what everyone else should do. Particularly Lord Lufton.

The chapters that focus on Mark are intensely uncomfortable. He gets himself mixed up with a wastrel named Mr. Sowerby, which creates serious risks to his financial security and reputation. So many times I wanted to grab him by the shoulders and yell at him to stop being stupid.

Trollope is such a gifted writer. He occasionally breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to the reader in a confiding and warm way. I became very attached to many of his characters, especially Lucy Robarts, sister of Mark, who is a lovely and worthy young woman. His marriage plots are fraught and provide genuine tension.

When I am reading Trollope, I wonder why I am not always reading Trollope. I like him so much more than Dickens.

CC Spin #40 – The List

I managed to complete CC Spin #39, so on the heels of that success, I’m spinning again! Here are my 20:

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
Vera by Elizabeth von Arnim
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Young Anne by Dorothy Whipple
Quicksand by Nella Larsen
Framley Parsonage by Anthony Trollope
His Excellency Eugene Rougon by Emile Zola
Ripley’s Game by Patricia Highsmith
Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
The Tortoise and the Hare by Elizabeth Jenkins
Inspector Imanishi Investigates by Seicho Matsumoto
The Horizontal Man by Helen Eustis
The Blank Wall by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding
Fools’s Gold by Dolores Hitchens
The Blunderer by Patricia Highsmith
Epitaph for a Spy by Eric Ambler
The 39 Steps by John Buchan
Stoner by John Williams
New Grub Street by George Gissing
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

1971: The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth

The Day of the Jackal
by Frederick Forsyth
Rating: ★★★★½
Publication Date: June 1, 1971
Genre: espionage
Pages: 434
ReRead?: No
Project: 2025 read my hoard, a century of crime

He is known only as “The Jackal”—a cold, calculating assassin without emotion, or loyalty, or equal. He’s just received a contract from an enigmatic employer to eliminate one of the most heavily guarded men in the world—Charles De Gaulle, president of France.

It is only a twist of fate that allows the authorities to discover the plot. They know next to nothing—only that the assassin is on the move. To track him, they dispatch their finest detective, Claude Lebel, on a manhunt that will push him to his limit, in a race to stop an assassin’s bullet from reaching its target.

I decided to read this after finishing the Peacock adaptation starring Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch, which my husband and I watched last month.

I had some fairly significant frustrations with the series, most importantly, I found basically the entire plot to be unworkable. Without going into too many spoilers, the entire series revolves around the release of some kind of a digital app that is going to drop on a specific date & at a specific time, and that a bunch of bad billionaires, including one played by Charles Dance (damn, can that man inhabit the evil rich dude character), want to derail because it is somehow going to reveal their financial chicanery to the normie plebes. They hire the Jackal to commit an impossible assassination.

My problem with the plot, and it’s a biggie, is that there is absolutely NO REASON EVER GIVEN as to why the irritating, Musk-ish, tech guy – who knows that he is the target of an assassination plot – doesn’t just release it early and make his assassination irrelevant.

Also, by the way, this iteration of the Jackal is the most incompetent master assassin of all time. The showrunner’s desire to humanize him really got in the way of him being convincing as the worlds greatest assassin. And the agent hunting him, played by Lashana Lynch, is no better, and may actually be worse. Anyway, I kind of enjoyed it, but it mostly annoyed me.

So, moving on to the book! After I decided that I would go back to the source material, I checked my kindle library and sure enough, I already owned it. This happens to me with somewhat embarrassing regularity – I bought it in June, 2018, probably because I thought my dad might want to reread it. I think it might have been be a reread for me as well, but if it was, I read it at least 35 years ago, and remembered nothing of it. There was no sense of background familiarity as I read.

The book is far superior, in my opinion. It doesn’t suffer at all from the plot problems of the television series. It’s a very engaging and believable spy thriller that relies on a lot of historical detail about the relationship between the target of the assassination – French President Charles De Gaulle – and the assassins – his former officers in the OAS who become disillusioned when he withdraws from Algeria, a former French colony. The Jackal is convincing as a baddie, but doesn’t quite reach anti-hero status – he is utterly amoral and ruthless. The French police officer hunting him is a very compelling character, and displays a lot of the best characteristics of law enforcement. He is humble and persistent, never flamboyant or attention-seeking.

The last 100 pages or so are absorbing. I really wasn’t sure how the book would end, so the tension was thick right up to the last moments.

I really love vintage spy thrillers – every time I read one, I want to read more.

1968: Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

Slouching Towards Bethlehem
by Joan Didion
Rating: ★★★½
Publication Date: January 1, 1968
Genre: essays
Pages: 256
ReRead?: No
Project: a century of women

The first nonfiction work by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era, Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains, forty years after its first publication, the essential portrait of America— particularly California—in the sixties. It focuses on such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up a girl in California, ruminating on the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.

I haven’t read very much non-fiction for this project, which might be a bit of an oversight. However, when I was looking for a book for 1968, I noticed that this one qualified.

I have not read much by Joan Didion and have always been vaguely bemused by her cultural importance because her body of work seems insubstantial to me. I did read her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking last year for a book club that ended up getting cancelled, and, while I didn’t dislike it, I didn’t find it to be some sort of grief rosetta stone, worthy of the hype.

So, I went into this with minimal expectations. And, overall, that’s about where I ended up. There were certain essays that really resonated – I especially liked the one about keeping a notebook.

“See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do… on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there…”

I thought that the title essay was very good, although the poem that lent it the title is better. The essay about Hawaii, I found weird, and ill-fitting to the collection overall.

The essays that touched on L.A. in the 1960’s were the most interesting to me, from a purely historical perspective.

“The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.”

And quotes from her piece on the Santa Ana winds have been everywhere recently, with the fires in L.A.

“It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself; Nathanael West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust; and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end. Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.”

Anyway, I remain somewhat bemused by her cultural importance, but Didion can definitely construct a sentence.

2016: When the Music’s Over by Peter Robinson

When the Music's Over
by Peter Robinson
Rating: ★★★★
Series: Inspector Banks #23
Publication Date: July 14, 2016
Genre: mystery: modern (1980-present)
Pages: 421
ReRead?: No
Project: a century of crime

When the body of a young girl is found in a remote countryside lane, evidence suggests she was drugged, abused and thrown from a moving van – before being beaten to death.

While DI Annie Cabbot investigates the circumstances in which a 14-year-old could possibly fall victim to such a crime, newly promoted Detective Superintendent Alan Banks must do the same – but the crime Banks is investigating is the coldest of cases. Fifty years ago Linda Palmer was attacked by celebrity entertainer Danny Caxton, yet no investigation ever took place. Now Caxton stands accused at the centre of a historical abuse investigation and it’s Banks’s first task as superintendent to find out the truth.

As more women step forward with accounts of Caxton’s manipulation, Banks must piece together decades-old evidence. With his investigation uncovering things from the past that would rather stay hidden, he will be led down a path even darker than the one he set out to investigate…

When I was thinking about my 2023 reading, I decided that I wanted to find a new, long-running series and immerse myself in it. I cast about a bit, and settled on the Inspector Banks series by Peter Robinson. I read the first one, Gallows View, (originally published in 1987) in January, 2023. I read Children of the Revolution, the 21st entry in the series, in January 2024. At that point, I took a break. The 22nd book in the series, Abbatoir Blues, isn’t available as a kindle book through my library, and I just sort of lost my series mojo.

There are a total of 28 books in the series as of now – Robinson is still writing about Inspector Banks.

I decided that it was time to catch up with Inspector Banks in 2025. I’ve requested that elusive 22nd book as a print edition through my library, and checked out When the Music’s Over, which I am using for the 2016 entry.

The plot of When the Music’s Over was cribbed from real life. I’m not particularly up on notorious English crimes, but even I had heard of the incidents that provided the basis for this novel: the Jimmy Savile scandal and the Rotherham child exploitation ring. (In odd moment of serendipity, (that fucker) Elon Musk has suddenly decided to be interested in the Rotherham grooming gangs at the exact same time I read this book. I hate that guy, even if what happened in Rotherham is indefensible.)

I felt like Robinson did a pretty good job meshing the two plots. The thematic coherence of the child abuse scandals – one historical, but with impacts continuing into the present, one current day – worked really well. He also split the two investigations between Banks and Annie Cabbot. Each of them displayed their personalities in their respective investigations. DI Cabbot charges in with her usual lack of discretion, and newly promoted DS Banks predictably gets himself into trouble with his superiors. It’s an open question as to whether he will retain that promotion in the aftermath of his investigation.

I am frequently annoyed by DS Banks, but I invariably come back for more. That must mean something, right?

1967: The Man on the Balcony by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

The Man on the Balcony
by Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö
Translated from: Swedish
Rating: ★★★½
Series: Martin Beck #3
Publication Date: January 1, 1967
Genre: mystery: silver age (1950-1979)
Pages: 194
ReRead?: No
Project: a century of crime

The chilling third -- and breakthrough -- novel in the Martin Beck mystery series by the internationally renowned crime writing duo, finds Martin Beck investigating a string of child murders. With an introduction by Jo Nesbo: "Sjöwall and Wahlöö have shoulders that can accomodate all of today's crime writers. And we are all there."

In the once peaceful parks of Stockholm, a killer is stalking young girls and disposing their bodies. The city is on edge, and an undercurrent of fear has gripped its residents. Martin Beck, now a superintendent, has two possible witnesses: a silent, stone-cold mugger and a mute three year old boy. With the likelihood of another murder growing as each day passes, the police force work night and day. But their efforts have offered little insight into the methodology of the killer. Then a distant memory resurfaces in Beck's mind, and he may just have the break he needs.

This is the third book in the Martin Beck series, which was published in Sweden and translated into English. The fourth book in the series, The Laughing Policeman, won the Edgar Award.

This is a classic police procedural – Martin Beck is all work and no play. It is focuses on Beck, although some of his colleagues have supporting roles, and it’s focused on the hard graft of investigating crime. Beck is a damaged protagonist – his personal life is in shambles, he is pretty much miserable all of the time. The characters feel very real. I’ve known a lot of police officers – I was a prosecutor for over a quarter century – and most fictional police officers feel about as real as the cowboys played by John Wayne in classic Westerns.

These guys, though, they feel real. They can be petty and irritable. They are not larger than life, rather they grind out the day-to-day work of solving crimes. They are manifestly unhandsome, they are of average, or sometimes even below-average, intelligence, they are plodding. They do not have magical powers of insight or understanding and, in fact, sometimes things are basically beating them in the face before they figure out what is going on. But, they figure shit out. That’s how real police work happens. With detectives putting on their shoes and socks and knocking on doors and talking to people.

I used to read a lot more Nordic Noir than I do now – especially Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallender series, and, of course, Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy. I’m trying to hit crime books that were sort of defining of various aspects of the genre as part of this project, and the Martin Beck series, in many ways, is the source material for all of those authors who came later.

My library has all 10 of the Vintage kindle editions that were re-issued in the 1990’s.

1970: Death in the Grand Manor by Anne Morice

Death in the Grand Manor
by Anne Morice
Rating: ★★★½
Series: Tessa Crichton #1
Publication Date: July 1, 1970
Genre: mystery: silver age (1950-1979)
Pages: 220
ReRead?: No
Project: 2025 read my hoard, a century of crime

'For God's sake don't get the idea that you're Miss Marple. It could quite conceivably lead to your being whacked on the head.'

The narrator of this classic mystery is fashionable young actress, Tessa Crichton-obliged to turn private detective when murder strikes in the rural stronghold of Roakes Common. Leading hate-figures in the community are Mr. and Mrs. Cornford - the nouveaux riches of the local Manor House - suspected by some of malicious dog killing.

Tessa however has other things on her mind when she goes to stay with her cousin Toby and his wife Matilda. There's her blossoming career, for one thing, not to mention coping with her eccentric cousins. Also the favourable impression made by a young man she meets under odd circumstances in the local pub. If it wasn't for that dead body turning up in a ditch . . .

The murder mystery will lead Tessa to perilous danger, but she solves it herself, witty, blithe and soignée to the last. The story is distinguished by memorable characterisation and a sharp ear for dialogue, adding to the satisfaction of a traditional cunningly-clued detective story.

Death in the Grand Manor was originally published in 1970. This new edition features an introduction and afterword by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

I had never even heard of this series when DSP announced that they were reissuing it. Death in the Grand Manor is the first book in the series, published in 1970. There are a total of 23 books, the last of which, Fatal Charm, was published in 1989. Whenever I think that I’m fairly well-versed in the history of crime fiction, someone comes up with a 20 book series that I’ve never encountered.

I liked this first book, but I didn’t love it. Having said that, I was intrigued enough that I will seek out a few more books in the series, especially since they are available for the kindle for $3.99 each.

I was 4 when this one was published, and I think part of what I enjoyed was the time period. I was just starting law school in 1989, when the final book was published. One of the things that attracts me to the series is the feeling that I will be able to reimmerse myself in a time that feels very familiar to me from my childhood, although I grew up in the U.S. and these books are set in England. Based on this first entry, the series isn’t exactly “cozy,” but it’s also not a police procedural or any kind of noir.

I started it in December, as my last Dean Street December book, but didn’t finish it until January 2, 2025.

Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith

Deep Water
by Patricia Highsmith
Rating: ★★★★
Publication Date: January 1, 1957
Genre: mystery: silver age (1950-1979)
Pages: 271
ReRead?: No
Project: a century of women

In Deep Water, set in the quiet, small town of Little Wesley, Patricia Highsmith has created a vicious and suspenseful tale of love gone sour. Vic and Melinda Van Allen's loveless marriage is held together only by a precarious arrangement whereby, in order to avoid the messiness of divorce, Melinda is allowed to take any number of lovers as long as she does not desert her family. Eventually, Vic can no longer suppress his jealousy and tries to win back his wife by asserting himself through a tall tale of murder — one that soon comes true. In this complex portrayal of a dangerous psychosis emerging in the most unlikely of places, Highsmith examines the chilling reality behind the idyllic facade of American suburban life.

Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn and domestic suspense don’t exist without Patricia Highsmith.

OK, maybe that is an overstatement – after all, it’s entirely possible that someone not named Patricia Highsmith would have come up with domestic suspense had she not published Ripley, Strangers on a Train and a book like Deep Water. Nonetheless, there is a through-line between Patricia Highsmith and books like Gone Girl.

Patricia Highsmith does not screw around, but she does mess with the reader’s head. And no one that I’ve read describes murder with so much visceral banality. When someone is murdered on the page in a Highsmith book, it is so extraordinarily disturbing – explained with clinical detachment, but also with rapt attention to the physical details and experience of murder.

Deep Water is the exploration of a man who is slowly cracking, but the facade is so resilient and convincing that it takes about 300 pages for him to completely unravel. The ending is utterly unavoidable and still shocking.

The Sleeping Beauty by Elizabeth Taylor

The Sleeping Beauty
by Elizabeth Taylor
Rating: ★★★★
Publication Date: January 1, 1953
Genre: fiction
Pages: 226
ReRead?: No
Project: 2025 read my hoard, a century of women

A subtle love story by one of the most accomplished writers of the 20th century

Vinny Tumulty is a quiet, sensible man. When he goes to stay at a seaside town, his task is to comfort a bereaved friend. Vinny is prepared for a solemn few days of tears and consolation. But on the evening of his arrival, he looks out of the window at the sunset and catches sight of a mysterious, romantic figure: a beautiful woman walking by the seashore. Before the week is over Vinny has fallen in love, completely and utterly, for the first time in his middle-aged life. Emily, though, is a sleeping beauty, her secluded life hiding bitter secrets from the past.

This was my third book by Elizabeth Taylor (the mid-century British author, not the movie star) – I’ve previously read Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (March, 2020) and A Game of Hide and Seek (January, 2019). Elizabeth Taylor makes me think of a slightly more acerbic version of Barbara Pym. There is definitely some acid there, but it is carefully masked.

In August, 2020, I noticed that Virago had issued kindle versions of Taylor’s novels, and that they were very reasonably priced. I thought it was probably a sale price, so I bought 7 of them: The Sleeping Beauty, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (I already owned the paperback, but what the heck, the kindle version was less than a cup of coffee), Blaming, A Wreath of Roses, At Mrs. Lippencotes, In a Summer Season and the Collected Short Stories. The prices don’t seem to have gone up since then, but I’m not sorry I grabbed them, and intend to read them all.

I have liked all three of the novels that I have read so far, and would really struggle to rank them. Elizabeth Taylor excels at characterization, and I always feel as if I really know her characters by the time I close the book. I’m rooting for all of them – even the ones that I didn’t really like (well, hello there Isabella), the ones who do stupid shit (good morning, Vinny), but especially the ones who really seem to deserve to find some happiness (Emily, Laurence, how are you?).

Like Barbara Pym, she seems to write very quiet plots, without much in the way of action. In spite of that, though, her books move forward in a compelling way. No one would call an Elizabeth Taylor novel propulsive, but, honestly, that’s one of the things I like most about mid-century women’s fiction. There is some tension in this book, but it’s a quiet sort of tension – no murder, no mayhem, no car chases. Still, the stakes are high, and, by the end, I was fully committed to these characters.

Autumn by Ali Smith

Autumn
by Ali Smith
Rating: ★★★½
Series: Seasonal Quartet #1
Publication Date: October 20, 2016
Genre: fiction
Pages: 264
ReRead?: No
Project: a century of women, booker prize

Autumn. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. That's what it felt like for Keats in 1819.

How about Autumn 2016?

Daniel is a century old. Elisabeth, born in 1984, has her eye on the future. The United Kingdom is in pieces, divided by a historic once-in-a-generation summer.

Love is won, love is lost. Hope is hand in hand with hopelessness. The seasons roll round, as ever.

Ali Smith's new novel is a meditation on a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are, on what harvest means. This first in a seasonal quartet casts an eye over our own time. Who are we? What are we made of? Shakespearian jeu d'esprit, Keatsian melancholy, the sheer bright energy of 1960s Pop art: the centuries cast their eyes over our own history-making.

Here's where we're living. Here's time at its most contemporaneous and its most cyclic.

From the imagination of the peerless Ali Smith comes a shape-shifting series, wide-ranging in timescale and light-footed through histories, and a story about ageing and time and love and stories themselves.

For many years, from the time that I was probably 18 until about 20 years ago, when I was just shy of 40, I read tons of literary fiction – my reading was split pretty evenly between literary fiction and mysteries. In my late 30’s, though, I went on a romance reading binge that lasted for two or three years, and at that point I essentially quit reading contemporary lit fic and have read almost exclusively genre fiction and/or classic/vintage fiction since then. The romance phase was short lived, but the anti-lit-fic phase had staying power.

I can’t exactly say why, but if I had to speculate it is because I grew weary of the great literary fiction theme of late-middle aged men and their obsession with their waning virility.

However, somewhat strangely, I’ve found myself drawn back in the direction of literary fiction – especially literary fiction by women (I am still impatient with literary fiction by men). I picked up Autumn both because I needed a book for 2016, but more importantly because I have a bookish friend who really loves Ali Smith. She is probably a big deal in England, but I had never heard of her.

It’s strange, but in a good way. It’s quite stream of consciousness, and can be difficult to follow. The frame of the story is, basically, a young woman named Elisabeth and her friendship with her very elderly neighbor, Daniel Gluck. Daniel is (now) a centenarian, and is in a coma. Elisabeth is visiting him in the hospital. Within this frame we have Daniel’s memories of his life, Elisabeth’s memories of Daniel, and digressions into Pauline Boty, a British painter and founder of the British pop art movement in the 1960’s, Christine Keeler and the Profumo scandal, and how both of them impacted Daniel (directly) and Elisabeth (indirectly).

The time period of the book is immediately after the Brexit vote, which occurred on 6/23/2016, so there are references to that political conflict.

All across the country, people called each other cunts. All across the country, people felt unsafe. All across the country, people were laughing their heads off. All across the country, people felt legitimized. All across the country, people felt bereaved and shocked. All across the country, people felt righteous. All across the country, people felt sick. All across the country, people said it wasn’t that they didn’t like immigrants. All across the country, people said it was about control. All across the country, everything changed overnight. All across the country, the haves and the have nots stayed the same. All across the country, the usual tiny per cent of the people made their money out of the usual huge per cent of the people. All across the country, money money money money. All across the country, no money no money no money no money.

Sounds exactly like the first (and second) election of Donald Trump.

Autumn is the first book in Smith’s “Seasonal Quartet.” My TBR list is so absurdly long that I cannot even begin to speculate when, or even if, I will get to Winter, Spring and/or Summer.